


Love Lashed By Its Own Self

by LittleObsessions



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, Episode: s05e26 Equinox, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Post-Endgame, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-11-13 16:52:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11189334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions
Summary: Even he wouldn’t have done that, even at his worst in the Maquis. Or maybe he would have. It’s easy to judge her when she’s at his feet.“What’s happened to me?”He will hold it to himself, until the day he dies, that these are the words she whispers against his neck as the transport descends upon them.A very dark take on the impact the events of 'Equinox' have...





	Love Lashed By Its Own Self

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MiaCooper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiaCooper/gifts).



> A huge, massive thank you to MiaCooper for beta-ing this. And my deepest apologies for the length of time it took. 
> 
> This is for her. 
> 
> Disclaimer: I write for fun, and I don't own anything apart from the (thin) plot.

* * *

**Love Lashed by its Own Self**

It was love lashed by its own self that spoke. It was pride half slain that fluttered in the dust. It was my hunger for your love that raged from the housetop, while my own love, kneeling in silence, prayed your forgiveness.” - Kahlil Gibran  


* * *

**_Voyager_ , the Delta Quadrant**

She looks like she wants him to do it. Eyes defiant, daring, and just a little bit afraid.

He imagines the supplication of it all; wrists held out, pressed together, to be bound. Her shoulders slumping as he turns her towards the turbolift and marches with her, hands held shamefully in front of her. She won’t speak as they walk, but there’ll be relief in every line of her body.  Then he’ll leave her in the brig and she might sleep.

She might, even, find some peace.

Her eyes are turbulent, furious with the challenge, but desperate too. She needs a way out, and he’ll be damned if he won’t fulfil that long-expected role.

“What are you doing?”

Her hand flies up to collide with his cheek, and he snaps his hand out to close around her wrist. Kathryn Janeway’s marked enough of him, without it extending to the reaches of the visible.

She whimpers as her delicate bones – not made of granite, though she wants them to be – crackle under his fingers.

When did it come to this?

“Stopping you,” he growls, “from doing something you’ll regret.”

“You don’t command me.”

She tries to pull free, but he tightens her grip. She backs up against the bulkhead and in the disastrous quiet of the corridor he can only hear her rasping, uneven breath.

“No, nothing and no one does.”

Her legs collapse under her, and she slides out of his grip and descends the slick wall, and curls into the tiny space between it and his boots.

She’s coming apart.

And a bit of him feels validated by it.

He doesn’t step away, so he looks down on her instead. Years ago, Kathryn Janeway would have found that unforgivable but – as she trembles against the bulkhead and tears begin to drip hotly onto the grey of her undershirt – she simply seems delicate, like old lace or paper.

“Please do it.”

“No,” he says softly, and he means it.

There’s not one part of him - despite his anger and pain - that wants to strip of her of the one thing she has left. Her humour has gone, her spark too, and her dignity. He won’t take her title.

“Chakotay…”

She groans and the groan becomes a howl of agony.

“Shhhh, Kathryn.”

 He bends down and scoops her into his arms. He thinks to take her to sick bay, she could use a sedative, but he doesn’t want to expose her any more than she already has been.  And the doctor’s sense of propriety would irritate him sorely. There’s really only one solution to it.

“Chakotay to transporter room. Beam myself and the captain directly to her quarters.”

_“Aye sir.”_

It’s only now he realises how light she is in his arms. Her weight barely registers – birdlike, a creature who can give inordinate beauty, and peck at flesh until it’s nothing - and, the last time he carried her like this, he was dragging her lifeless body from a shuttle.

That was as traumatic as this is, but in an entirely different way. She’s still dead, somehow, still lost to him. Yet she’s breathing, and she’s warm.

And though he can’t see it, she’s losing life like blood.

She lifts her head, buries it in the crook of his neck.

It isn’t acceptable for a First Officer to be cradling the body of his Captain like this. But then they’re not just a command team.

What they are is indefinable, and painful.

And what she was just about to do is befitting of no captain.

Even he wouldn’t have done that, even at his worst in the Maquis. Or maybe he would have. It’s easy to judge her when she’s at his feet.

“What’s happened to me?”

He will hold it to himself, until the day he dies, that these are the words she whispers against his neck as the transport descends upon them.

 

**San Francisco, The Inquiry into Command on Voyager - day 29**

“And then?”

Noah Lessing looks hesitant, casts his eyes away from the panel and into the mid-space of the room, and Chakotay remembers the look with a vividness that comes upon him like a sudden light in darkness – sore, disorientating.

His eyes slide towards the woman who sits, not quite in the dock, but on the raised dais. Her hair is pushed back and up, her uniform pristine. She looks frozen, a bust who can barely see over the solid half-wall of the dais. She looks as if she’s somewhere else. Perhaps she is.

Of all the days, she told him, this was the one she most dreaded.

This morning he watched her, fingers trembling as she gripped the edges of the sink, and he didn’t go to her. He was rooted to his spot, in front of the toilet, tidying himself back into his shorts, and he knew there was nothing he could do.

The only person who will ever feel this in the way it should be felt – sharp glass against thin, ivory skin – is Kathryn Janeway.

He doesn’t know how to take this away from her, because it can’t be taken. No one can hold this.

Seven, at his side but placed firmly enough away from him to make it clear that – to use his words – _they are just friends_ , tips her head to the side with that disastrous, frustrating curiosity.  Gretchen, familiar and almost too much, slides her fingers out to touch his in comfort, then rethinks it.

Kathryn claims she’s nothing like her, but she is.

They’re both good at withholding.

Phoebe doesn’t come.

And she asked the rest of the crew to stay away.

The interesting thing, the least painful thing, is that no one – not Gretchen, nor Seven, nor anyone for that matter – knows what she did.

Only Noah Lessing. And Chakotay.

“And then Captain Janeway spoke with me.”

The aversion is as much a shock to Kathryn as it is to Chakotay, and perhaps, he sees, even to Noah Lessing.

 

**San Francisco, Janeway’s Temporary Quarters, Starfleet H.Q.**

“Let me stay until the morning,” he says, whispering it across the pale skin of her shoulder.

She looks into the fire – she’s lit it every night, and he knows she’s seeking something she can’t quite grasp, and he knows that if she’ll just let him stay, he can give her it.

She’s settled between his legs, on the massive lounge chair, and her back rests against his chest. Idle, uncalculated fingers circle and trace the skin above her lounge pants.  He buries his nose in her growing hair.

“You know-“

“I know you’re frightened – “

“I don’t get frightened.”

He kisses her shoulder, lips dragging across the skin. Then he lifts his wine and takes a sip.

“You’re a liar.”

“I’m worse than that,” she says softly, and she means it.

“I love you anyway.”

She doesn’t answer, because she hasn’t yet said it, but instead she tips her head back onto his shoulder.

He won’t hold his breath, but it’s enough to take her in his arms and have her moan his name. Maybe one day she’ll let those dreadful, honest words cross her lips.

“Tell me about the good things...”

She asks. She always asks.

“Neelix, Kes, the time we found all that deuterium on the M-class planet with those strange purple fruits, Naomi…”

She nods, curls her fingers around his own.

“I forget.”

He kisses her crown.

“I know.”

“What side of the bed do you take?”

It takes him by surprise, because he didn’t expect it. He didn’t expect she’d answer the same question he’s asked nightly since their return with an affirmation.

“Whatever side you don’t sleep on.”

“Okay.”

Perhaps she doesn’t remember.

 

**_Voyager_ , The Delta Quadrant **

Her quarters are cool and dark.  He goes to leave, once he’s set her on her feet, to seek out Lessing and demand his silence.

He’s happy to be her enforcer, he will sell himself to anyone to try and regain even a fraction of what is gone from her. He needs Lessing’s silence to be absolute, because there can be no possibility of this escaping to spread around the ship.

But she simply says, ‘Stay’.

And because it’s so rare, and it’s years old as a request, he does as she asks. He doesn’t know why he’s to stay, but he stands precisely where he is.

She strips, peeling the uniform away from her body. It’s a skin, fine and lingering to stick to her bones.

She slides her bra from her body – black lace, there’s something grotesque in the reveal of her, and something holy  and her panties from her hips.

As she curls over to slide them down her legs, her spine ripples out of her thin skin. He dares a look between her legs.

He doesn’t know where to go, or what to do.

“I need to feel something,” she doesn’t turn, doesn’t move from where she climbed out of his arms.

“Kathryn…”

“Don’t leave me.”

It’s not pleading, it’s an order.

“This isn’t right,” he murmurs.

She looks over her shoulder, and her eyes glisten like ice on a frigid morning, and he realises that look has been there for such a length of time that her eyes have changed colour.

He thinks they used to be blue.

“Nothing is.”

He swallows.

“What you were about to do-“

She turns to face him, and he’s completely floored by the sight of her. Fine, pale, utterly without shame or mercy.

If he hadn’t changed so much too, he’d be repulsed.

Instead there’s a sheen on her skin that he wants to taste.

“You want this?”

“Haven’t I always?”

 

**San Francisco, The Inquiry into Command on Voyager - day 29**

 “Can you elaborate?”

Lessing’s throat bobs with a dry swallow, and it’s only then that Chakotay feels it’s safe enough to look at Kathryn. Her eyes are gelid – letting in nothing and giving nothing - and that is amongst the most terrifying of the things he has to witness as the man who’s sworn fealty to her.

“She discussed my decision to protect Captain Ransom.”

“Can you recall what she said?”

Lessing shakes his head.

“No.”

Kathryn’s head dips forward, just fractionally, and he knows she is recalling it where Noah Lessing will not. There were no words to be recalled, none really. The lingering fetor of fear comes back to him as he watches her in the present, defiant sweat turning to fear in front of him, the threatening alto of her voice, and the whirring otherworldly screech of the tortured life forms seeking revenge.

And the slamming reality of what she had been willing, all too willing, to do.

 

**_Voyager_ , the Delta Quadrant **

“We can’t.”

She just smirks, red lips lifting at one side in scorn.

“Fine,” she shrugs, and then turns.

Before he can fathom why, he is behind her, fingers curling around her slender wrist to stop her hard and pull her against him.

She just laughs, but it is hollow and devious, and winning.

She wins at everything.

It goes to a confessional from which he can only retrieve in nightmares that what he just watched her do was erotic.

Her threatening the life of someone, in a situation so far removed from acceptability that it should make him want to weep, has made him harder than he’s been in years.

She feels it, and thrusts her rear hard into the synthetic cotton of his uniform. It pulls a grunt from him, half turned on and half furious. He bites down on her shoulder and, as per her request he thinks wryly, she feels it. A little hiss of pain gurgles from her throat as blood bubbles into the shape of his teeth on that perfectly ivory skin.

“Oh yes,” she groans, throws her head back and the smell of her hair catches in his nostrils, stalling him in a thrall of cherry blossom and old books.

She moves again.

“Commander,” at the use of his title he wants to kill her, “don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

He simply pushes her forward into the depth and silence of her bedroom.

**San Francisco, Janeway’s Temporary Quarters, Starfleet H.Q.**

“He lied for me,” she says, her first words after they’ve been home for an hour.

She’d sat motionless by the window, hands occasionally scrubbing at her face, then moved to the replicator and called up a whole bottle of whiskey and two glasses. He’d made dinner that’s heating in the unit, and he knows now it won’t be touched.

She leans forward for the bottle and pours another, for him and for her.

“You threatened him, didn’t you…after…”

The words, fragments of ice, melt on her tongue. He wonders what they taste like.

He nods.

He recalls the taste of her blood, the taste of her body, the taste of her tears.

He recalls the taste of her pain.

“Thank you.”

He takes a swig of the golden, devious liquid, and it burns its way down his gullet.

“It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done,” he doesn’t look at her. “All the worse for it because he still stands by it.”

“What did you say?”

She strips off her jacket and tosses it aside, clambering across the couch to cover the small space between them. Then she curls into his lap, her head resting against his.

“I can’t remember,” he says, and it isn’t a lie.

He’s erased it from his memory, and the only trace which lingers is the knowledge that what he’d done was as wrong as what she had been prepared to do.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she admonishes, and a part of her means it.

“You always leave me no choice.”

Her mouth; damaged, lying, clever with pretty words, seeks out his; bitter, vengeful, desperate for any taste of her.

She kisses the doubt of moments away, and he feels safe enough to say it.

“I love you.”

And it’s only then, he realises, that she sees the depth of what he was willing to do. Not for the crew, not for the ship, but always for her.

The words come easily to her, and so he resents the time it’s taken for her to say them. And he resents that it is in the giving up of his principles that the words finally find light.

“I love you too.”

 

**San Francisco, The Inquiry into Command on Voyager - day 29**

“She busted us down to crewmen,” Lessing says, without moving his eyes to anywhere that isn’t the chronometer at the far end of the wall, “and she was right.”

The words don’t ring quite true, like tapping a box which looks full but is hollow, but it’s enough to satisfy the Inquiry board. The approving nods seem to signal another hurdle crossed, and he wonders if this is the one she was most likely to fall at.

In his mind, he concedes that she fell a long time ago.

He sometimes likes to delude himself that he caught her, but it’s not as hallowed as all that. He knows, somewhere along the line, he fell with her.

And he enjoyed it – and he’ll enjoy it until the day he dies.

“Mr. Lessing, do you feel Captain Janeway’s actions in pursuing Ransom were at all unacceptable?”

Lessing pauses for a moment, a moment where Chakotay’s heart stills in his breast, and then he opens his mouth to answer.

“Captain Janeway is an incredible leader, sir. But like all humans, she has moments of weakness. She saw the error of her ways very quickly…” at this his eyes swivel towards Chakotay. “I believe the commander helped her.”

Chakotay feels faint.

 

**_Voyager_ , The Delta Quadrant**

“Lights,” he orders, “fifteen percent.”

The computer follows his command, washing the room in a grey, delicate light which detracts from the sharp brutality of bodies slowly degrading at the mercy of sins and sadness. She stands at the bottom of her bed, knees pressed to the edge as she swivels her head again.

He strips and she watches, and he does it with a slowness that he can see infuriates her. He wants her to lose her steel in that moment, to turn and say they cannot do this. Instead, just as he pulls his undershirt over his head, she lies back on the bed, legs open, and eyes wide and challenging.

“I want you.”

She says it as if it’s true.

“I’m not what you want,” he says lowly, shirking off his trousers and underpants.

Her eyes wander towards his groin, and she licks her lips, and he feels validated all at once.

“If it makes you feel better…” she shrugs, closes her thighs, sits up. “No one is making you do this. If I’m too destroyed, then that’s fine by me, Commander.”

Underneath it all, there’s a lingering sense that she wants him to tell her she isn’t, that she’s still precious and someone who can be saved.

He knows better.

“When was the last time someone made love to you Kathryn?”

She looks crestfallen, and then twists her head to cast her eye back to the bloody crescents of his teeth on her shoulder.

She almost laughs – he sees the ghost of it flittering on her lips - but when she speaks her voice is cracked, breaking, starting to come apart.

“A long time ago.”

She sets her hands out and uses them to leverage herself to her knees, still far away from him, but drawing herself taller.

“There’s a difference, isn’t there?”

She asks, as if a woman of her age doesn’t know.

Then she holds out a hand, beckoning, and he’s compelled by a force he cannot comprehend.

He should run.

 

**Janeway’s Temporary Quarters, Starfleet H.Q.**

 “I mean it,” she says softly. “I mean what I say.”

He nods.

“I know you do Kathryn.”

She runs her fingers along the lines of his tattoo, curving round his jaw and into his hair.  She settles her lips against his ear.

“I know what you did for me,” she whispers. “I won’t ever be able to pay you back.”

“I don’t want payment,” he says softly.

“What do you want?”

He watches her fingers undo the buttons of his shirt, and stalls them.

“I have it.”

“A damned woman?”

She tries to joke as he holds her hands in place, over his heart.  But her voice, so manipulative and honeyed, betrays her as it cracks.

“You’re going to have to let me in eventually. You can love me, and I you, but if you don’t show me, this won’t work.”

“What if what you see repulses you?”

She asks, utterly serious, and the wide set of her eyes, the openness of her, is suddenly terrifying.

“I’ve seen all of you,” he says. “Damned or not. I want to see it all again.”

 

**San Francisco, The Inquiry into Command on Voyager - day 29**

At Lessing’s words, Kathryn lifts her head to look at him. There is a gentleness on her face, a gentleness he only sees when she lies in his arms – sated, tired, candid and weak against the advances of his conversation.

It is at these times, between midnight and dawn, that he thinks he might be able to claw her back.

Now, she shows him it in broad day light.

He thinks he might weep as she opens to him like a flower in the breadth of this public space, her eyes closing the world to just the two of them as Noah Lessing defends the indefensible.

Because everything about the woman he loves is defensible, even if it doesn’t look it from the outset.

 

**_Voyager_ , the Delta Quadrant                                         **

That pale, perfect hand is easy to take.

“You want this?” He asks her, smelling, seeing, her desire as much as he feels it.

She looks down at him, hard, throbbing and sore, then quirks a brow.

“What about that made _you_ want me?”

He squirms.

“I can’t talk about this,” he grips her jaw between two fingers. “I won’t. I’ve always wanted you.”

She shrugs, pupils dilated to a black lust, and he looks down to see her grinding against her own fingers, glittering and pale and slick.

He nearly dies.

He stands back and watches the exhibition – and it is an exhibition – as she lies back, lifts her hips off of the bed and drives her fingers into herself.

“Do you do that often?”

“All the time,” she breathes. “And you’re just next door.”

He growls and moves forward, thrusting another finger inside her, mimicking her movements. She moans a little, rotates her hips away from his hand and withdraws her own.

“I want you,” she says, and it’s cold and unfeeling.

“Oh I know,” he lunges forward, grasping her legs and pulling her towards his body. “And if that’s what you want, that’s what you get. Isn’t that always the case?”

“Oh Chakotay,” she curls up onto her knees and away from him, before one of those pale hands beckons to him. “Don’t be so bitter.”

Then she moves forward, working her fingers over the curves of his pelvis, tracing the ‘v’ shape there. He runs his fingers through her hair, curls it at the ends, and wraps it in his own fingers.

He watches, as if in someone else’s body, as she leans forward. Then she takes him in hand, mouth sinking around his cock. He groans, tightens his fingers in her hair as she takes more of him, eyes watering and bright as she looks up.

He pulls away from her mouth.

“Don’t,” she says. “I want to do this.”

There’s something of subjugation in her voice, something of a plea.

“Let me-“

He pulls her up, brings her flush with his body, and wraps her in his arms. She struggles for a moment, fighting a tidal wave of things he knows he feels too, then her lips fall onto his.

He kisses her, resisting the urge to bite down on her dangerous mouth.

“I’m going to make love to you now,” he murmurs into her hair. “And if that’s worse, tell me to go.”

“Don’t.”

He pushes her back onto her bed, settling her as she falls. She looks at him, eyes wide and pleading for something he doesn’t understand.

 

**San Francisco, The Inquiry into Command on Voyager - day 43**

The court is milling, moving, jostling with the end of the inquiry.

All clear.

Not yet, he thinks. Not really.

He moves towards Noah Lessing, lets him shrug his hand off of his shoulder as he turns.

“I owe you nothing Commander,” the young man says quietly, before Chakotay can say anything. “You’re no better than me.”

He cannot answer. He cannot answer because he catches her eye across the room, and she pulls him away.

When he reaches her, she curls her fingers in his.

“Enough.”

And he nods.

She takes his hand in hers, and she leads him out.

**San Francisco, Janeway’s Temporary Quarters**

She sits back, watching as his fingers trail a line down the buttons of her shirt.

“All of it?”

He nods, knowing this is a first; this opening, this sudden recognition of what she feels for him.

“Chakotay,” she moves forward and settles her legs around his hips.  Then she curls her face into his chest, holding there, just above his heart. “Make love to me. And then stay.”

It’s the first time she has asked.  He lifts her face to look at him, and her eyes are wide and open.

He nods.

She leans back, places his hands on the front of her shirt.

This isn’t the first time he’s undressed her, though it’s the first time she’s let him undress everything; take off every layer she’s worn, the metaphorical and the literal.

“I love you,” she says, as he slides the shirt over her shoulder and down her elbows.

His hands move around her back, loosening the clips of her bra, letting its weight drag it over her shoulders. She lifts her hands so he can pull it away. There is complete silence, though she watches him with an intensity which is blinding.

“I love you Kathryn,” he whispers. “I love you, all of you.”

“All of me,” she repeats, leaning forward and pressing herself into him. Her mouth is warm on his neck. “I love you too.”

He settles her back on the couch and stands, then kneels at her feet. He slides her panties away, leaving her completely naked. Her skin is glazed by the light of the fire, and she doesn’t flinch in self-consciousness like she once did. She seems to move towards the warmth.

He traces his mouth over her knees, over her soft thighs, into the dip of her hips.

 

**_Voyager_ , The Delta Quadrant **

He crawls between her legs, and he feels her eyes on him as he dips his mouth to taste her, without preamble or permission. Her pale, lean thighs fall open around his ears.

She moans, gently.

And the reaction surprises him, the familiarity of the act bizarre in the fact that he’s never done it before. He feels her nails scrape along his scalp, then her fingers tangle in his hair.  He presses his tongue against her, and she bucks her hips up, and he feels her muscles tighten and knows she’s near.

He clamps his hands around her hips, holds her to the bed, and does it again, quicker this time.

Her reaction, a hissed ‘ah’, is the only thing which lets him know she’s coming. He presses his tongue to her still, listens to her ride it out. She softens into the bed, her fingers uncurling from the tightened knots of bedsheet she’s gathered within them.

 

Her back arches up and down on the mattress, her breathing calming as he watches her, his gaze on her face. She locks eyes with him, and time seems to slow down. Then she nods, and it’s all the permission he needs to know, now, that he can give her what she needs.

Not what she wants, but what she needs.

She raises herself up on her knees, eyes never leaving his face, and lifts her fingers to trace his tattoo.  She does it like she’s following a pattern, trying to get to the end of a maze.

He wants to tell her he isn’t a puzzle, that everything that is here is here for her to see in its fullness.

But she always has her eyes closed.

She climbs into his lap, sliding down onto him, latching her mouth onto his.  They fit, he thinks, romantically. They fit like he thought they would, like they should.

But then Kathryn is a shape-shifter, she can fit anywhere.

She braces her hands on his shoulders and starts to move, their bodies so flush there is no space. Her lips, seeking, do not leave his. She lets him lift her up and down onto him, his hands curling around her lean hips. Completely in control.

He slides his fingers into her hair, watches as moments become minutes, stretching into eternity, and then she comes against him. The visceral little moans, delicate and soft, surprise him. He expects her to roar, but she moans, like a wounded animal.

Only then does he permit himself to take pleasure from her.

When it is over, he curls up beside him on the bed, and he pulls her flush against his own skin.

“I-“

She begins, and he sees the walls rebuilding themselves.

“Don’t,” he says softly. “It’s alright.”

“It won’t ever be alright again.”

“It will,” he laces his fingers with hers. “Trust me.”

But trust, for Kathryn, is as elusive as air.

 

 

 

 

**San Francisco, The Inquiry into Command on Voyager - day 43**

They stand in the sun dappled court yard, the press filtering away with the crowd. He looks at her, and leans forward to press his lips to hers.

“I’m done.”

And it means so much more than just the trial, or the command. He touches her cheek softly, in the summer silence. It feels like the end, and the beginning, all at once.

“You forgive yourself?”

She looks at him, “I will learn.”

He takes her hand in his.

“Home?”

She smiles. “Finally.”

 

**_Voyager_ , the Delta Quadrant**

 As much as he doesn’t want to, he leaves her bed. Once he is sure she is asleep, he pulls his uniform back on, struggling to tear his eyes away from her lying there, pale and gentle in the passing light of stars. Here, she seems breakable. He pulls the sheets around her, shields her body and leaves a kiss on her forehead.

For a moment, he pretends this is what they are.

He finds Lessing in crew quarters, and sends Tuvok’s detail away. They look momentarily unsure but he is the First Officer, and they don’t dispute it.

Noah Lessing’s eyes are dark, and inscrutable, and the Maquis captain who was ruthlessly capable of things Chakotay is not, is suddenly in the room. 

“You tell no one what happened today,” he says softly. “Am I understood?”

“She nearly killed me.”

“She wouldn’t have,” Chakotay lies, meaning it.

“You’re wrong,” Lessing snaps.

“Noah,” he sits down beside him, “I don’t want to threaten you, but I will. I will ensure your silence in any way I can. Am I clear?”

Noah gives him a sideways glance, and then a rueful smile.

“You know you are no better than her?”

He stands, lets the words hang in the air, and then turns to the door.

“I wouldn’t want to be.”


End file.
